As a raw oyster eater I experiment with toppings. Sometimes I squirt some lemon juice on the raw oysters. Sometimes some horseradish. Sometimes nothing.
When I heard about researchers who found that sprinkling hot sauce on raw oysters clobbered bacteria, I wanted to learn more about this report. And I wanted to give the hot sauce routine a try.
One thing I learned quickly. Nobody was claiming that a few shakes of hot sauce on a raw oyster automatically made the oyster safe for everyone to eat. Rather, a pair of Louisiana researchers found that hot sauce had wiped out bacteria on the surface of the raw oyster meat. However, most of the bacteria that matters are not on the surface of the oyster. They are deeper in the oyster meat, in the critter's stomach, where a few dollops of hot sauce are unlikely to penetrate. So scientifically speaking, the main reason you would put hot sauce on a raw oyster would be because you liked the taste.
This is not a finding that is going to shake the halls of learned societies. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my journey into the science of hot sauce and oysters.
It began in Louisiana, a state that has lots of oysters and lots of hot sauce. Two doctors at the Louisiana State University Medical Center, Charles V. Sanders and Kenneth Aldridge, looked into how the Vibrio vulnificus bacteria found in oysters got along with hot sauce. They outlined their findings last fall at a New Orleans conference sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology.
Vibrio resides in an oyster's digestive tract. When a raw oyster is eaten, vibrio sometimes causes minor discomfort among healthy people but can be deadly to people with deficient immune systems. The bacteria are killed by cooking.
Dr. Sanders, chairman of internal medicine at LSU, said in a telephone interview that he had long wondered whether the condiments that Louisianians traditionally put on raw oysters had any effects on bacteria. So he, along with Dr. Aldridge, a professor of medicine at LSU, ran an experiment. Dr. Sanders told me he and his colleague "mixed sauce with organisms, . . . incubated the mixture, . . . looked at the low pH."
What I got from this short telephone seminar was that when vibrio bacteria and hot sauce tangle, the bacteria lose. Dr. Sanders did not seem to be claiming much more. He called the experiment preliminary, and said while it raised interesting questions it "did not prove anything."
